Failed your MOT?

Dear Honorary Platonians,

Your Supreme Queen would like to award the Freedom of Capricornia to Martin Rosenbaum.  Who he?

Mr Rosenbaum (FOC) is the excellent and most irritatingly persistent Freedom of Information reporter at the BBC.

He's just managed to extract from the VOSA [that quango that demands you pay a fine if you don't tell them that your car is on-bricks] all the MOT failure data going back years and years.

Now, you may be wondering why it took an FOI campaign to get such obviously interesting and pro-consumer information released... bizarrely, VOSA refused to publish the data on the basis that it could "mislead the public".

Mislead?  How can data on MOT failure rates by vehicle make and model do that?  Sure some people will flog a car or van into the ground without it ever seeing a spanner - but is this really true for say your average Vauxhall or Peugeot driver?

Now, this wasn't the only reason VOSA gave.  They do say that the real reason for a decision or opinion is usually the second one - and here it is:

"The release of information relating to specific make and model would be likely to be commercially damaging to vehicle manufacturers whose failure rates appear higher, and therefore less favourable, than other manufacturers...this information would be likely to be used by some manufacturers to gain a competitive advantage, for example by publicising that their failure rate is lower than another manufacturer's failure rate for a comparable vehicle model."

Erm, surely it's in everyone's interest to know which manufacturers have crap reliability and which don't - and for an element of competition to be introduced based on the MOT rate seems like an excellent idea since they're compulsory...

But still, in the spirit of Professor Phil Jones of University of East Anglia fame - once VOSA felt compelled to release the data, they came up with that familiar wheeze of sticking it into a PDF - all 1200 pages of it - because it would take 'several days' to publish it in a nice convenient format like a spreadsheet.

What sort of crap is this?  It didn't start life as a PDF - and frankly Plato would be very surprised if VOSA used Dead Sea Scrollsoft  v3.02 to create the original  database [perhaps Harry could write them a Hide-The-Decline programme for manufacturers at the top of the failure list].  So it's really handy that Mr Rosenbaum had a copy of Excel handy and converted it from his office chair instead.

Here it is - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/MOT_Make_Model_Comp_2007.xls